“Why not just go on and make a dollhouse?” I said.
He rocked in his armchair, staring out the window.
“What do you call it? ‘Ode to the Suburbs’? ‘Hymn to Mary’?”
He kept rocking.
“ ‘In Praise of the Good Life’?”
I went around to the front of his armchair, where he would have to look at me. “Finally I get to where I understand, and then this is the piece you show me,” I said. “But you I don’t understand. Never. Jeremy? Wasn’t I what you needed? Surely you’re not going to say she was. Are you? Was she?”
But even when I stood directly in his line of vision, it didn’t seem that he saw me. His eyes were as flat as that cat’s eyes in the kitchen. He saw beyond me, without even having to try. There was a small trembling smile at the corners of his mouth. Only crazy people smile like that.
All I had to pack were the few things I’d brought in my knapsack — jeans and T-shirts, two of each. I left behind my ice-blue blouse and my shiny white Mexican dress and my white trenchcoat and my gray smock with the shimmery embroidery across the yoke. I packed some fruit and a box of granola. I was starved. I slid into my sandals and went out into the street.
How did it get so cold? All the leaves were down. The wind blew straight through my shirt and I had to hug the knapsack against my chest to keep warm. What I had planned was to walk out a ways and then hitch a ride on some larger street. I was thinking of going south. I didn’t want any two-block errand-runners picking me up. But it was so cold that I started right in thumbing where I was, walking backwards down a line of parked cars. People whizzed past staring sideways, as if they didn’t know what to make of me. Then the traffic light at the end of the block turned red and the cars started coming slower, preparing for the stop. I saw a Cadillac with tinted windows, one lady driving it all alone. A plump cheerful lady wearing a hat. I thought surely she would stop for me. I held my thumb higher, so that the cold air prickled all the little hairs on my arm. I looked straight at her through the windshield as she rolled closer. Please, lady! I’m only eighteen and a girl to boot, and it seems much brighter and colder out here than I had expected. I didn’t know the sky would be so wide today. Won’t you please give me a lift? But the car rolled past. I was so sure she would stop I had already turned, ready to reach for the door handle. She didn’t even look at me. Just slid on by, leaving me standing there with my mouth open and my teeth chattering and my heart about to break. Now, why couldn’t she have let me in? She had so much space! She seemed so nice! Her car looked so warm! Would it have hurt her any just to reach across and give me a smile and open the door? Why did she leave without taking me along?
9. Fall, 1971: Jeremy
First he tried making a woman seated at a sewing machine, but the curve of her back kept coming out wrong and after a while he gave up. Then a child with a cat, but he lost interest halfway through. Then a girl braiding her hair, which he finished because he made himself, but he knew it wasn’t right. Lines came out knotty, angles awkward, flat planes lumpy and uneven. He kept ripping things out and then neglecting to replace them, sitting instead on a stool beside the piece while his hands went on working at useless tasks, at picking a cuticle or creasing the material of his trousers. Why couldn’t I have been a musician, he wondered, and played what other people have already written down? Why not a writer, just giving new twists to words I already know? Yet Miss Vinton, bringing him cocoa, smiled at the statue of the girl and said, “Why, it’s Darcy!” He was only modeling the people he had seen in real life, wasn’t he? No. There was no way to sum people up; he was making new ones. An imaginary family. He stroked the imaginary Darcy’s hand with a touch like a feather. Then he shook his head. “Sorry,” Miss Vinton said. “I thought — here, I brought some cocoa. I won’t keep you from your work.” She went out on tiptoe, protecting his concentration. All she saw of him was the seamless exterior — Sculptor at Work. She never guessed at the cracks inside, the stray thoughts, tangents of memory, hours of idleness, days spent leafing through old magazines or practicing square knots on a length of red twine or humming under his breath while he tapped his fingers on the windowsill and stared down at the people in the street. A morning of half sleep on the couch in the corner, five minutes changing the slant of the statue’s eyes, an afternoon playing with a tube of Christmas glitter powder.
He had heard that suffering made great art, but in his case all it made was parched, measly, stunted lumps far below his usual standard.
In his sleep he worked so hard that sheer exhaustion woke him up. He dreamed of cutting scraps of moonlight, strips of rain-spangled air, long threads of wind. Arranging them took such effort that he could feel his brain knotting. It seemed that he was aiming for some single solution, as in a mathematical problem. “Is this it? Is this it?” No answer. No click in his head to tell him he was finally right. He awoke feeling strained and damp, hoping that morning had arrived, but it hadn’t. He always found himself in an opaque darkness, behind drawn shades and closed curtains, swaddled in grayish bedclothes. His life, he thought, was eye-shaped — the tight pinched corners of childhood widening in middle age to encompass Mary and the children, narrowing back now to this single lonely room. The silence hummed, and sometimes voices leaped out of it and startled him. He knew they were not real. They were accidental, something like the cells formed by molecules colliding and combining. He heard his sister Laura praising a friend’s needlework, Pippi talking to a lady-bug, a long-forgotten medical student requesting a new study lamp — all those separate eras weaving themselves together in his head. Mary asked if he needed new pajamas. Had her voice really been that young, once upon a time? Why, when they first met she must have been barely twenty-two. He had never thought much about that before. To him she had always been calm and stately, ageless, classical. Only now he remembered her flashing laughter and the pounding of her feet up the stairs and the whimsical, pigtailed paper dolls she used to make for Darcy. Her easy tears, her tempers with the children and the sudden way those tempers would disappear in swift, impulsive hugs that reminded him of reunions after journeys. How had he managed to overlook all that? He had loved her for the wrong qualities, the ones that were least important or that perhaps she did not even possess. He had ignored the ones that mattered. “How’s your supply of socks?” she asked him. Behind her words he heard sparks and ripples, maybe even laughter, maybe directed at the absurdity of the subject they were discussing.
In the dark his mother’s voice was thinner than a thread, weaving its way through a tangle of other people’s words. “Oh, Jeremy, you were always so … I really and truly don’t …” She spoke with that whispery sigh that meant he had done something wrong — a sigh not of anger but of disappointment. Well, of course. Lying here on his back, watching his mistakes roll across the ceiling, he felt he had done everything wrong. “Why, Jeremy?” she used to say (when he spilled his milk, or wrinkled his clothes, or failed to make his bed). “Why are you treating me this way? I’ve been as good to you as I know how to be. Now I see that being good is not enough.” It occurred to him that she had spoken truer words than she knew. Being good was not enough. The mistakes he reviewed were not evil deeds but errors of aimlessness, passivity, an echoing internal silence. And when he rose in the morning (having waited out the night, watching each layer of darkness lift slowly and painfully), he was desperate with the need to repair all he had done, but the only repairs he could think of were also aimless, passive, silent. He had a vague longing to undertake some metaphysical task, to make some pilgrimage. In books a pilgrimage would pass through a fairytale landscape of round green hills and nameless rivers and pathless forests. He knew of no such landscape in America. Fellow pilgrims in leather and burlap would travel alongside him only long enough to tell their stories — clear narratives with beginnings, middles, ends and moral messages, uncluttered by detail — but where would he find anyone of that description? And think of what he would have to carry in the rustic knapsack on his back. The tools of his craft: Epoxy glue in two squeeze tubes, spray varnish, electric sander, disposable paintbrushes. Wasn’t there anything in the world that was large scale any more? Wasn’t there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside? He fumbled for his clothes and picked his way downstairs. He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward.